We launched Vaadin 7 Certification almost a year ago to follow the initial Vaadin 7.0 release. The few hundred of you who have taken the exam have given us valuable feedback on the certification and now, nearly one year later, we're happy to announce new, revised, certification questions. To celebrate this, we've made the certification available for free to all of you for just this week.

During this week the Vaadin 7 Certification exam is free for everybody!

You read that right: No exam fee, if you take the online exam during this week. If you've ever thought about getting a Vaadin certificate, then now is the time to do it. Head over to My Account at vaadin.com/pro/certification and take the exam now.

The offer is valid until Sunday, the 16th of March until midnight, and you may try once during the week. 

Be prepared

You shouldn’t take the exam unprepared. And fortunately there are good resources available for you to study.

First of all, the exam is based on the Book of Vaadin. If you don’t have a hard copy, you can always browse it online or download a PDF.

Secondly, we have a huge live Vaadin Q&A session coming up on Wednesday March 12th. If there is something that you want to know and make sure before taking the exam, this is an excellent chance to talk to a Vaadin expert. The schedule is as follows:

Expert schedule for Wednesday March 12th

• 1.00 PM CET Vaadin Expert Peter Lehto

• 2.00 PM CET Vaadin Expert Thomas Mattsson

• 3.00 PM CET Vaadin Expert Leif Åstrand
   

Of course you can ask questions and discuss live, but if you want to ensure your question gets answered, please ask in advance and register to the session.

Not ready yet? Get a personal trainer

For those of you who wish to become certified Vaadin experts, but don’t feel ready yet, we recommend taking a look at the training schedule at vaadin.com/training. There are plenty of chances for you to attend an open classroom training this year, and if you enroll during this week, you can get a 20% discount to any of them!

Good luck everyone!

Sami Ekblad has been working at Vaadin Ltd since 2000. He has had various roles from Vaadin R&D to large-scale Java EE application development, project management and Vaadin community management. You can follow him on Twitter – @samiekblad

In addition to providing out-of-the-box social-collaboration, eXo Platform is a user experience platform (UXP). It comes with a full set of social intranet UX-oriented features such as a wiki, forum, calendar, activity stream, community spaces as well as an out-of-the-box CMS and document management system – all in one single platform.

What the developer community might like is that eXo is also open source and highly extensible. Developers can build their own web applications and services on top of the platform and offer new capabilities to their users. If needed, they can handle several low-level services such as authentication and access control. The platform has also been designed to host and run extensions (add-ons), so that all customization needs can be met.

If we look under the hood, eXo Platform was built from the ground up on a flexible and standard-based enterprise portal framework: GateIn (a common open-source project co-led by Red Hat and eXo). Thus, portlets (JSR 286 and WSRP), gadgets (OpenSocial) and content can easily be aggregated in a secure and customizable way.

I am pretty sure that you have now guessed what I am getting at: what if you could use the powerful experience of Vaadin to build stunning web apps on top of eXo Platform?

That is exactly what we describe and explain in this first simple tutorial.

Any Vaadin application (or portlet), even ones using a custom theme or widgetset, can be quickly deployed on your eXo Platform Server. Only a few Vaadin libraries need to be installed and your application will be ready to run in the eXo application registry. In other words, you can take full advantage of the whole Vaadin stack, and leverage the collaborative features from the Platform.

Then, for more advanced portlets, there are further options through the easy access to standard APIs (JCR and CMIS), as well as social APIs: spaces, activity streams, polls, posts, wikis and more. This actually gives us many ideas for future tutorials and add-ons! Stay tuned.

Tristan Glenat is an experienced web application enthusiast, social platform believer and UX activist. He currently leads the Product Teams at @eXoPlatform SEA.

Apache TomEE is an increasingly popular certified Java EE server that is based on Tomcat and other Apache libraries like OpenJPA and OpenEJB. The fundamental idea behind the project is to customize the widely beloved Tomcat as little as possible, throw in required (Apache) libraries and certify the result. And the result is a liberally licensed open source Java EE server that is extremely simple, yet powerful and very business friendly.

Rest assured that this server is built by true professionals. The father of TomEE, David Blevins, has a long experience as an author of several Java EE standards and tools you are probably already using today - or have used in the past. To make the option even more compelling for corporations, David recently started a venture called Tomitribe to provide commercial support for TomEE.

David Blevins, Joonas Lehtinen, Fredrik Rönnlund and Matti Tahvonen on a coffee break at Vaadin HQ.

A while ago when David was joining our JFokus cruise on the icy baltic sea, I promised to build some examples of how one can use the Apache Java EE stack with a modern Apache licenced RIA UI library. Yes, the latter is Vaadin. Connecting Java libraries isn’t rocket science, but I hope a complete example app helps you to get started faster on your domain problems.

TomEE has a small and clean archetype for JPA backed web apps. It implements a simple book inventory app, but the default UI is built with JSF and is rather harsh. So I decided to replace the JSF part of it with my favourite UI technology. In addition to working more efficiently in plain Java and forgetting about all web development details like request and response, you’ll also get a more usable and better looking app out of the box.

Instead of just reading and adding book entities in the app stub, I also completed the exercise to be a more usable full CRUD example with a floating editor window for book entities. If you try with both Faces and Vaadin, I know which one you’d rather be using ;-)

You can of course get started with plain Vaadin as well, but the example also uses Vaadin CDI helper to connect to existing services and my generic Vaadin toolbox to remove some boilerplate code. Both also come with the business friendly Apache 2 license. So in case you are not interested in changing your app server at this point, you might still want to check out the example to learn how one can de-couple stuff in UI code using CDI events or to create a confirmation dialog for your destructive action with a one-liner.

Check out the tutorial-like simple steps to convert your faces app to Vaadin from the github project.

PS. There is also a larger example of replacing JSF with Vaadin in works, based on a Java EE Petstore example by Antonio Goncalves. It is almost “feature complete”, but until I can suggest to base your work on that we’ll need some serious refactoring, cleanup and security enhancements (passwords are not encrypted!). Feel free to join the effort.

Matti Tahvonen is a Vaadin "R&D veteran" who has been working with our products for over 6 years. His current responsibility is to keep you up to date with latest and greatest Vaadin related technologies. You can follow him on Twitter – @MattiTahvonen

As a rehearsal for my workshop at GWT.create 2013, I gave an internal presentation/workshop last year about responsive layouts in Vaadin. The workshops at the conference weren’t recorded, but fortunately we record all of our internal presentations and trainings, so you have a chance to see this workshop after all (the content has only small differences to the actual workshop at the conference).

During the two hour session I briefly introduce the concept of responsive layouts and then proceed to implement a very typical collapsing header-sidebar-content layout – which works across desktop, tablet and phone browsers – using Vaadin, Sass, media queries and the Vaadin Responsive add-on.

If you’re interested in the source code for the example, you can get that from GitHub. The slides are available there as well: https://github.com/jounik/GWT.create-workshop

Jouni Koivuviita is the main CSS and graphic wizard at Vaadin. He’s been responsible for the core themes since 2006, when he joined Vaadin, but he also enjoys playing with GWT and JavaScript when creating great web apps. You can follow him on Twitter – @jouni